Joe Biden: Working In Private Equity ‘No More Qualifies You To Be President Than Being A Plumber’

During his Tuesday campaign speech at Keene State College in New Hampshire, Vice President Joe Biden criticized presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney‘s claim that his background in business makes him a more suitable candidate for the presidency, saying that working in private equity “no more qualifies you to be president than being a plumber.”

Biden defended his campaign’s scrutiny of Romney’s tenure with Bain Capital, clarifying that “I’m not criticizing private equity firms, but I’m suggesting the people who run them, the same quality and objective of running a private equity firm is not what qualifies you to be president.”

Romney has made it a centerpiece of his campaign that his background in private equity gives him a keen understanding of business, and thus a better idea for how to get us out of our economic troubles. Biden criticized that notion, saying that “when you are president, your job is to see to it that companies make a profit, but not maximize profits at everybody else’s expense. You look at workers laid off to retrain them and get them rehired.”

“Your job as president is to promote the common good,” Biden continued, before concluding, “That doesn’t mean the private equity guys are bad guys. They are not. But that no more qualifies you to be president than being a plumber. And by the way, there are a lot of awful smart plumbers.”